


when life gives you lemons ...

by midnightsnapdragon



Series: Nostalgia [19]
Category: Lunar Chronicles - Marissa Meyer
Genre: Accidental Marriage, F/M, Modern AU, Student Exchange AU, University AU, Waking up in the same bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-19 23:02:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14882895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightsnapdragon/pseuds/midnightsnapdragon
Summary: Cinder and Kai decide to make the best of a drunken mistake.





	when life gives you lemons ...

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by _Laws of Attraction_ (2004) - not the stalker horror film, obviously. The romantic comedy with Pierce Brosnan.

**i.**

If someone had told Cinder, a few months ago, that this morning she would wake up somewhere in the highlands of Denmark, she wouldn’t have paid them any mind. Given them a strange look, maybe, and forgotten about it.

If they had told her that she would be waking up next to a young billionaire, the heir to a major international corporation, she would have snorted and asked them to describe, in detail, a situation in which that could ever happen.

If they’d told her that she would be waking up in Denmark, next to the protégé of the Eastern Commonwealth, with a wedding band on her finger – well, she would have laughed in their face.

And you know, Cinder had almost gotten used to the surprises. Two years ago, during her first week at university, she’d run into Huang Kaito – yes, that Kaito, who was supposed to inherit the fortune of Huang Rikan’s empire – when he’d approached her during lunchtime and sheepishly asked her to fix his GPS. Cinder had been drawing up some engine schematics at the time and hadn’t been in a very good mood, and she’d looked up with a frown, but the irritable “Come back later” died on her lips when she realised who, exactly, was standing in front of her.

He’d actually looked embarrassed. “Huang Kai, politics,” he said, extending a hand.

She took it almost dazedly. “Linh Cinder, automechanics.” It was a normal greeting, a casual greeting, the way everyone at uni introduced themselves: name, field of study, and sometimes relationship status if you were very drunk. She took the GPS from him, having already forgotten that she’d been about to turn him away. “What seems to be the problem?” 

They were from two different worlds: she lived in a cramped apartment in the noisiest, dustiest part of the metropolis, and had gone sleep-deprived for weeks to get a scholarship, while he had grown up with polished granite floors and crystal decanters and the promise of a bright future wherever he turned. And yet – surprise number two – within a few months, Cinder and Kai had become fast friends.

Sure, there were little things that made Cinder think there was Potential. How he reddened whenever she teased him about being handsome, mostly after they extricated themselves from ambushes by his little fan club – a group of first-years who were fond of the little sector of woods between the Humanities building and the tech workshops, where an Interested Party could hide behind a cluster of tree trunks and scare the living hell out of someone walking down the path.

And sure, Cinder looked forward to their outings to the town theatre or biannual festival as she looked forward to nothing else, and her heart kind of tripped whenever she caught him looking at her with that thoughtful expression – and yes, a few times he’d casually invited her to something that most others would constitute as a date, and there had been moments when she had wanted to kiss him, or had seriously thought that he was about to kiss her – 

But nothing happened. Theirs was an easygoing relationship of banter and lunches together and texting to complain about their professors and hey, are you coming to Spirit Day? and no, I’ll be in the workshop, bring me back some sticky buns. They weren’t friends like Cinder and Iko were friends, or like Kai and Carswell Thorne were friends, but … things were good. Comfortable. And if someone had told Cinder that one day soon she would wake up next to him somewhere in northern Europe to discover a wedding ring on her left hand, she would have laughed. In. Their. Face.

(Uncomfortably. And with some involuntary blushing.)

Yet here she was. 

Wrapped in a cotton quilt in a Danish bed-and-breakfast. 

Slowly recalling that she was on an exchange trip with her friend Kai, the boy who happened to be sleeping next to her with messy hair and rumpled pajamas. 

Staring horrified at the flowery little ring on the fourth finger of her left hand, the finger universally reserved for one’s wedding band, the finger she’d always thought would remain bare.

And she was not laughing.

**ii.**

“Oh, stars,” she whispered.

For a moment, the only thought in her mind was a sort of sluggish denial, like she was in a really weird nightmare that would surely end soon. Cinder stared at the ring and willed it to disappear as easily as sleep. It would not. She pinched herself and blinked and watched the second hand on the clock tick by, but in vain. 

“Oh my stars,” she said again, louder this time.

Kai turned over and mumbled something in his sleep. Cinder gave him a furious stare. The ring had dominated her sleep-befuddled thoughts, but now she realised exactly what sort of situation she was in.

She frantically flipped back through her memories of the night before.

There had been a street festival, a big one. She remembered a river full of blossom-crowns and rowboats. She remembered dancing in the square, and lanterns … some kind of national holiday? She remembered a priest’s gold-embroidered robes, and someone’s hand warm in hers as the old man droned on, and Kai’s laughter – 

Not caring if she woke him, Cinder grabbed Kai’s left arm and found his hand and –

He had a wedding ring too. 

Oh. No.

“No, no, no,” she growled, throwing back the covers. She jumped out of the bed, stumbled once – ouch, my head, might have had a bit too much to drink last night – which would explain her fuzzy memories – but no, think, Cinder, she needed to logic this out. She couldn’t be married!

“Hnnng?”

Cinder whirled, eyes wide and livid. Kai was awake, rubbing a hand over his face to stifle another yawn. He looked adorable, which was absolutely no excuse for –

“Morning,” he said, squinting at her with sleepy eyes.

Her hands clenched into fists. Her shirt was slipping free of her shoulder, and the loose pajama pants weren’t flattering in the least, but for once she didn’t care.

“What happened last night?” she demanded, striding up to the foot of the bed. His eyes had started to close again. Cinder grabbed the bedcovers and pulled. “Wake up, you idiot!”

“Not nice for so early,” Kai mumbled, keeping hold of the covers. He burrowed his head under the pillow. “Five more minutes …”

“KAI!” she bellowed, and yanked the quilt free. 

He grabbed for it wildly, missed, rolled to the side with one hand outstretched – and with a whump, fell off one side of the bed. 

Cinder crossed her arms and waited. Five, four three, two …

A pained groan emanated from behind the mattress. Kai stood, wincing and rubbing his shoulder, now fully awake. He gave her an injured look. “Good morning, Cinder. Fine day for tossing your friends to the floor.”

She didn’t deign to respond. Instead, she held up her left hand, spreading her fingers wide. “What,” she asked, her voice shaking a bit, “is this?”

Kai blinked at her across the room. “It’s a ring.”

Cinder pointed at his hand. “And what is that?”

He glanced down. Lifted his fingers, flattened them to better view the band … raised an eyebrow. “Also a ring.”

She glowered at him. Kai frowned right back, appearing baffled. A long moment stretched out.

“Please tell me,” she said finally, through her teeth, “that we did not spontaneously get married last night.”

Kai drew back, an incredulous look spreading over his face. Then, to her utter infuriation, he started to laugh, really laugh, like she’d told a very funny joke.

“Be serious!” Cinder snapped, though doubt pricked at her. Was she being silly?

“Is that what this is all about?” Kai clutched at his stomach, trying to contain himself. “They’re just rings, Cinder. We probably bought them from a kiosk or something.”

“I remember a priest,” she insisted.

He shook his head and straightened, the laughter spent. “And I remember too much wine for dinner.”

“Which is exactly why we might have – you know –”

Kai raised his eyebrows at her, a smile still pulling at his mouth. “Gotten a religious quack to marry us?”

Cinder bristled. “Well, yes!”

He ruffled his hair, making it stick out at all sides, and moved toward the dresser. When he pulled out a drawer, though, he was met with Cinder’s work clothes, all spattered with dirt and grease in various places. He frowned in confusion.

“Oh, yes,” she said acidly, “by the way, we’re in my hotel room.”

“What will the neighbours think?” Kai murmured into the drawer. Their eyes met in the mirror, and he must have seen the near-hysteria on her face, because he gave her an exasperated look. “No one can get that drunk.”

How could he be so blasé about the whole thing? They’d just woken up in the same bed after a night of wine and dancing and possible matrimony, and – and …

Cinder set her jaw and grabbed a bathrobe off an armchair. “I’d rather not live with any maybes.” She swung it around her shoulders and walked into the bathroom. “We are going out there right now, and we are going to find that priest, and you stay back if you like but I am going to find out whether or not I’m –” She broke off, reddening slightly.

Kai raised his eyebrows innocently. “My wife?”

She gave him her deepest scowl and shut the door with unnecessary force.

“Do we get to have breakfast first?” she heard him call, “Or are we going to wander around in our pajamas?”

Cinder grimaced at her reflection. Her brown hair was a mess, her skin flushed from sleep, her angular figure obvious beneath the floppy clothes. Was this the sight she’d make for a future husband when he rolled over in the morning?

Stars, what a disturbing thought. She pulled off the ring and set it decidedly on the counter.

Maybe she’d overreacted. After all, the rings weren’t traditional plain gold. They hadn’t slept together. And they didn’t even have documentation, which would be damning. The evidence was actually pretty flimsy as it was.

All the same, though, Cinder wouldn’t have put it past her drunk self to agree to marry Kai. She liked him, and she’d accepted that a long time ago.

But why he would ever agree to such a thing was beyond her.

**iii.**

Late that evening, when the sky had gone black and streetlights cast an orange glow on the pavement, Cinder and Kai sat opposite each other in a restaurant gazebo. She was glaring determinedly at the bottle of wine between them. He wasn’t smiling or teasing her anymore.

Ten minutes passed without a word. Fifteen minutes.

Finally, when the silence had stretched into something painful, Kai cleared his throat.

“So … he has certification.”

Her scowl didn’t ease as she gave a single, tight nod.

“And there are the documents?”

Without taking her eyes off the bottle, Cinder reached down and slapped a bundle of papers onto the table between them. Kai flinched. Neither of them needed to look through to know that their sloppy but fully recognizable signatures were on every page.

“Okay,” he muttered to himself, nervously running a hand through his hair. “Okay. I mean, this doesn’t have to be the real thing.” He blew out a breath. “Is it even legal for someone to get married in a matter of hours?”

Cinder remained furiously silent.

He drummed his fingers on the table for a minute. “Research. We have to research. If it comes to it, we can probably burn these, right?” When Cinder didn’t answer, he glanced up at her with an uncertain expression. “There are probably a dozen ways out of this. We can –”

“Kai,” she said through her teeth, cutting him off, “please just … shut up for a minute.”

He opened his mouth to say okay, stopped himself, and sat back.

A part of him wanted to panic. Marriage was a binding and permanent thing, and he definitely didn’t want to fall into it without a lot of forethought and preferably a standing relationship. Another part of him thought that there must be some sort of loophole, some way to escape the bonds.

And yet another part of him, the part that had always looked at Cinder with something more than friendship, smarted at her reaction to this unexpected turn of events. Would it really be so bad to get thrown together with him in this way?

Not that he wanted to be married at the youthful age of twenty-one, but maybe this could nudge their relationship along, start the romantic ball rolling … you know, once they’d proven the documents illegitimate and gotten themselves out of the whole mess.

“Cinder?” he said quietly.

She sighed. “What?”

“You know we can always get a divorce, right?”

She dragged her gaze up from the table to meet his eyes. After an eternity, she managed a tired smile. “Yeah, but what a fiasco for your parents. Imagine the scandal if this ever gets out to the papers.”

Kai shrugged. “Who cares? My parents don’t have to know.”

“Are you serious?”

“Sure. If we want to get married, start a relationship, that’s our business, right?”

Cinder squinted at him around the bottle. He shifted, wondering if she was going to comment on the start a relationship bit, which they technically hadn’t done. 

Yet.

But all she said was, “We have to divorce before leaving Denmark. When does the exchange semester end?”

“May.”

“Right. We have maybe two months. You read up on the legal matters, I’ll find the priest and ask him again.” Cinder slouched in her chair, looking weary. “I’ll drag him by the collar if I have to.”

“So long as you don’t drag me by mine.”

She closed her eyes. “I just might.” The threat dissipated in midair, without her usual sarcastic bite. 

Kai bunched his lips to one side, watching her. Something occurred to him, a suggestion he could make, and pass off as a joke if she took offense. Maybe it would lighten the mood.

“You know,” he said casually, watching her expression, “there technically can’t be a divorce until there’s a honeymoon.”

For one terrifying moment, Cinder didn’t move. Then her eyes snapped open, and they were livid.

No time to pass it off, he had time to think, before she lunged at him like a shark and he had to scramble out of his chair. She missed him by a hair and promptly gave chase. One after the other, they streaked out of the gazebo, getting strange looks from passerby on the street, but Cinder was too enraged to notice, and Kai was too busy running for his life.

“We still have two months!” he yelled over his shoulder, neatly dodging three telephone poles and five parked cars. “Plenty of time!”

“Famous last words!” Cinder roared after him.

And then, all at once, Kai realised that she wasn’t coming after him anymore. Uncertainly, he slowed down and looked back down the street, and relief washed over him when he saw Cinder leaning against a telephone pole and laughing her head off. Silly, exhausted laughter, like she just didn’t have the strength to be mad anymore.

He crept up to her cautiously. “Are you okay?”

She touched her forehead to the metal and closed her eyes, still smiling. “Yeah, fine. Sorry. I overreacted.” A deep exhale. “It’s just … this is ridiculous, isn’t it?”

“Completely unbelievable,” he agreed.

“We’re married.” She sounded as incredulous as if the sky had turned green. “Great stars. You’re my husband.” This sent her into another gale of snickers.

Kai grinned. “There could be a bright side. You know a married couple can get discounts on apartments, right?”

“Really?”

“You can get all kinds of benefits from your spouse. We would pay less taxes, too.”

Cinder squinted at him in the bright lamplight from above. “Only if we both had an income, though.”

“Well, with the EC Corp., and your future mechanic business …” He held his breath, wondering whether the expression of disbelief on her face was for him or for the idea of taking advantage of their situation.

But she only narrowed her eyes and said, “You mean that this could be mutually beneficial.”

“Well, yes.”

“Are you joking?”

Kai looked at his shoes. “I don’t know. Maybe not.”

She gave another disbelieving laugh. “I don’t know whether to yell at you or kiss you.”

He sucked in a breath and darted a swift look at her. But Cinder wasn’t being sardonic – rather, she was wearing a half-embarrassed, half-sheepish expression that told him she hadn’t really meant to say it out loud. She glanced at him sidelong, a small smile tugging at her mouth.

A balloon was expanding inside him, filled up with sudden glee.

“Well … you’ve already done the former.”

Cinder rolled her eyes, though the smile was growing. “Come here, then.” And, just as she’d threatened before, she grabbed him by the shirt collar and pulled his mouth down to hers.

Kai forgot every single one of the scenarios he’d conjured over the past few years, all the different ways he’d imagined their first kiss. He never could have predicted that it would happen under a streetlamp in Denmark with totally unplanned wedding bands on both their fingers. The only thing he knew was the sheer delight radiating from his heart to his fingertips as lifted his hands to her shoulders, then cupped her neck, letting everything else fade away.

Cinder sighed into his mouth, her grip on his shirt becoming gentle. A few partygoers leaving the nearby bar whistled at them, but neither really cared. Kai took her face in his hands and drew out the kiss, hoping it would be absolutely certain when they broke away that this was not a joke or a marriage obligation at all.

“Is this the part where it becomes official?” he murmured a minute later, leaning his forehead against hers as they stood quietly under the streetlamp.

Cinder still had her eyes closed. “That’s how it goes, isn’t it?” she mumbled, her breath warm against his cheek. The night was getting chillier. “Sign the documents, say the vows, kiss the bride and voilà, husband and wife.”

“I didn’t mean the marriage,” said Kai, but didn’t get to explain himself. His lips were otherwise occupied once again.


End file.
